This disclosure relates generally to reviewing content for online systems, and more specifically to validating content policies for evaluating content.
Online systems, such as social networking systems, allow users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the online system. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Online systems allow users to easily communicate and to share content with other online system users by providing content to an online system for presentation to other users. Content provided to an online system by a user (i.e., user-provided content) may be declarative information provided by a user, status updates, images, photographs, videos, text data, any other information a user wishes to share with other users of the online system, or a combination thereof. User-provided content may include sponsored content that a sponsoring user (e.g., an organization) requests to be presented to other users who are not necessarily connected with the sponsoring user.
To ensure a high-quality user experience, online systems may remove low-quality content having characteristics violating a content policy such that this content provided by a content provider is not actually delivered to users or is revised before delivery. Content may be deemed low-quality because it contains offensive, unintelligible, or malicious elements. Offensive elements include text, images, or videos that are suggestive, violent, sensational, or illegal. Unintelligible elements include poor grammar, illegible words, words in a language different from a user's language, or an image obscured by overlaid text. Malicious elements may collect private information, misrepresent a product or service, or deliver malware to a user's computer.
New content policies that restrict what content is delivered to users are typically deployed across the entire set of users of the online system without a validation process. As a result, it is difficult to predict user response of the new content policies prior to deployment.